“Hold it!” Jibby whispered. “Hold it!” And Wampus knelt on the birch. The fire ball blazed and sent up black smoke, and in less than a minute the string that held it to the birch caught fire and burned through and the fire ball fell on the pile of stuff. It lay there and burned and the top of the pile of stuff caught the flames and began to burn, too.
“Yip! Ye-ow-wow!” Jibby yelled, like a wild Indian, and he picked up a hunk of dead wood and let fly at the negroes, and we all did the same, and yelled as hard as we could.
About six out of ten of the things we threw hit where we meant them to hit, and those three black men jumped to their feet and stared around for just about one second of time. They were scared ash color, and they did not know where they were for a moment, but they saw the black smoke piling up from the pile of dunnage and they started down the Run faster than we had run from the bumblebees.
“Dyn’mite! Dyn’mite!” they shouted, but we did not wait to see or hear any more. Jibby was not waiting. He legged it away from there, and we were not two steps behind him, and when he was deep in the woods he threw himself down, and we did as Jibby did. It seemed the wisest thing to do.
We were no more than flat on the ground before there came a big, flat, heavy sort of boom! and then sand and small gravel fell on us like a sort of rain, and Jibby got up. We went back toward the edge of the Run, keeping mighty quiet, and we heard the seven men come loping down the creek, and, when they reached the place where we had blown up their stores, they swore and said they might have known it was not safe to trust those worthless darks.
“We-all sure has got miserable luck,” the man called Jim said, in a most disgusted way. “Just when we find the green sand, we get our stuff blowed to nothing. Now we’ve got to go and get more feed and more dynamite and more everything. It’s bad luck, but I’m right down glad of one thing; them darks was blowed clean to nothing, too.”
They stood there awhile looking at the deep hole the blast had blown in the creek bed, and then they went on down the Run, growling and complaining, and we knew we had a couple of days at least to dig for treasure before they came back. We slid down the bank and took a look at things ourselves. The bushes and grass and weeds had been blown away clean, and there was a hole where the sand had been, ten or twelve feet deep and about twenty-five feet long, and as wide as that.
Jibby Jones sat down on the edge of the hole and began to take off his pants, because he did not have any shirt to take off—he had torn it to strips.
“Wampus,” he drawled out, in that slow way of his, “you take the kerosene can and go back and ask Mrs. Catlin if she will lend us another can of kerosene. I’m going to take a bath in the good old swimming-hole. I thought maybe there would be one on this Run, somewhere.”
And, sure enough, there was the water trickling into that hole, and when Wampus got back with the kerosene, Tad and Jibby and Skippy and I were all in the pool splashing around and having a gay time. Jibby was right; there was a swimming-pool in Murrell’s Run.
XXIII
Treasure Trove
The new swimming-pool that had been dug out in the creek by the explosion was rather muddy, but it was wet, and it was fun to think we were swimming in a pool nobody had ever swam in before. It was like discovering a new ocean or something.
Wampus put down the can of kerosene.
“Come on out,” he said. “If we are going to dig for that land pirate’s treasure today, we had better be burning out the bumblebees and getting at it. Bill Catlin was home this time, and he’s coming over. He wanted to know what we were going to do with the kerosene, and I had to tell him, and he’s going to make us give him half of all we find.”
“Why? What right has he to make us do that?” I wanted to know, for I didn’t think Bill Catlin or anybody else had a right to any of that treasure when Jibby had been the only one to think of it being there, and when we had planned so hard to get it.
“Treasure trove, that’s why!” Wampus said.
And just then Bill Catlin came to the edge of the creek bank and looked down at us getting into our clothes.
“Well, boys,” he said, “here I am. I hope we find enough to make us all rich and happy all the rest of our lives. Hurry into your duds and we’ll get busy.”
Jibby Jones was putting on his pants as slow and deliberate as if he had all day to do it in, and right there I made a mistake. I ought to have kept my mouth shut
